Sunday, December 6, 2009

The porn flu epidemic- column in Business Bhutan

The ongoing debate over the circulation of adult clips, which the police found was leaked from a computer taken for repair, conspicuously missed a point the global anti-pornography movement has been highlighting.

Pornography is violence against women: the movement has argued. This is based on the fact that women featured in adult movies were first driven into sex work, and then were forced before the camera.

The first local media report on the issue suggested that one of the clips (latest reports say four local clips are circulating) was made for commercial purpose. But this theory collapsed when the husband in the clip filed a complaint with the police.

Thereafter, the ‘moral angle’ of the issue was eclipsed by concerns of ‘careful use of technology’. Kuensel, in its November 2 issue, quoting the police, said the “clippings are a result of ignorance and carelessness on the part of the people involved.”

More than a decade back, before such acts of private pleasure because a public spectacle, the small south Indian town I grew up saw very limited exposure to adult entertainment. What was available then, Social anthropologist, Sanjay Srivastava, has named as Footpath Pornography comprising of film actresses’ posters, how-to-do manuals, cheap black and white reprints from magazines like Playboy. Street sellers, in the light of kerosene lamps, would sell vernacular story books with badly printed photographs of shy sex workers.

Then adult video cassettes dominated the scene, along with the rising popularity of Indian magazines like Debonair, which was then edited by Vinod Mehta, the present head of India’s most popular news weekly, Outlook.

Those were the times when technology - public phones, televisions, movie theatres, and camera that uses film – was a public affair. Phones and televisions sat in living rooms, hundreds sat in movie theatres, and camera rolls had to be taken to a studio to be developed. Chances of recording a person’s private moments were slim.

But the former public instruments transformed and could be carried in a handbag, in the form of high-tech phones, digital cameras and laptops. Technology became a private affair. Interestingly it also transformed the nature of personal relationships. Before, if a girlfriend had to prove her love by agreeing to have sex with her boyfriend, now she has to agree to film intimate moments on a mobile phone camera.

Professional adult movies have always censored ‘emotions’ between actors so that the viewer can focus just on the ‘act’ and not worry about relationship woes in what s/he watches. But the circulation of leaked videos, which display not just sex but also emotional intimacy and love between couples, has taken porn-watching beyond basic pleasure needs.

When we measure the culture barometer of a society, along with age-old values, the interplay of private technologies and human desire cannot be ignored anymore.